Style and voice are elusive qualities that make your writing uniquely yours. When your personality, passion and conviction come through to the reader and pull that reader into what you are saying to the extent that they come away touched by your treatment of your subject, you have been true to your voice, your individual writing style.

When you pour out your heart on a page that is for your eyes only, you are writing with your own voice. If you are an avid journaler, go back and read some of those old pages that were spur-of-the-moment. Note the words you use, the descriptions; the types of sentences you write--long, short, inverted; the rhythm and flow of your material, especially when read aloud. Take time to get to know your writing personality.

If you don't journal, start! Don't tie your self to a rigid schedule that takes the fun and spontenaity out of the exercise. But allow yourself plenty of opportunity to write when you are unconcerned with rules, with a reader, or with an editor, either your internal editor or an external one.

When a piece is cardboard, static and something anyone who can form a complete sentence could string together, you can be certain that it is because your voice is absent. Why does this happen? There are three basic reasons:

1) Your heart isn't involved in the subject.

2) Your knowledge of your subject is too shallow and scattered to come across clearly and engagingly.

3) You are trying to write the "right" way and are too bogged down in rules.

One of the key ingredients to letting your voice shine through is to write from the heart. Don't try to write about things you don't care about, no matter how "marketable" they may be. When your heart is not involved in your subject, you can't get readers involved on that level. We read to learn, but even moreso to be drawn in, to experience and yes, to be entertained.

Writing from the heart also involves holding to a style of expression that is naturally yours. Don't infect your writing with words and phrases that you would never use in spoken language, or in a letter to your best friend.

To relate a topic in your personal voice, you must first have a thorough knowledge of your subject and a clear idea of how you want to approach it. This has to be done before you even start writing your article, and to some extent before you even write the query.

Don't confuse a subject with a story. Infertitility, for example, is a subject--there are a wide range of specific ideas that could be developed from this subject. Your job is to know the magazine you target and then focus, or angle, your subject specifically for the readers, developing a story that will suit the publications needs.

You'll need a fresh approach, one that doesn't sound like the same tired old story. And this quality of freshness and originality must be present when you pitch the piece, or you won't get the chance to put it in the piece itself.

You will also find that learning about your topic often generates new excitement and enthusiasm for the topic. The more convinced you are that the topic is worth talking about, the more heart goes into the piece.

Once you have knowledge and an approach, then think the material out. Assess for yourself the value of the material and decide on a logical point of view. There is no great talent in gathering material. That is only step one. You have to think about your material long enough for it to take definite shape in your mind.

The real story is not in statistics or facts, but it lies in the people involved. Peter Jacobi (The Magazine Article, Think It, Plan It, Write It, Writer's Digest Books, 1991) descirbes it as "sifting facts through personality, the personality of the people involved in the topic you're covering and your own personality as a writer." When you inject the human aspect of statistics--the people involved or affected and tell that story in your own words, it's no longer dry facts.

Remember when you are studying the articles in target publications to determine the leads used and so forth, that your goal isn't to blindly copy what has been written in the past. You want a feel for what the magazine handles so that your article isn't so far out in left field that it is out of the comfort range of the readership. But originality is another ingredient that will lift your article out of the ordinary. So study other writers to learn how they solved their problems, but remember that imitation usually doesn't sell.

Like all the other aspects of "style" and "voice" originality is hard to define. The original writer will develop a piece in a way that seems most logical and effective to him, no matter what any other writer before or after may say or do.

Don McKinney (Writing Magazine Articles That Sell Writer's Digest Books, 1994) gives this example. He says that a writer whose voice he has never been able to resist is Bil Gilbert. Bil's work appeared for many years in Sports Illustrated and is found mostly in Smithsonian. McKinney reports that Gilbert loves all living things, although he is partial to those with four feet or wings. And he writes about what he loves with style and individuality. Here is a quote from McKinney's book. He's quoting an article that was written by Bil Gilbert.

"In a 1979 piece called "The Missouri Kid," Bil recounts the adventures of a mosse who had, at the time he wrote, been roaming from the Canadian border as far south as the outskirts of St. Louis. Not only had a moose never wandered this far, but he had been doing it for two years at the time and showed no signs of going home.

"Bil introduced him as '. . .an extraordinary animal, a Marco Polo of moosedome, a Magellan of its kind. . . His travels have been so remarkable and his adventures so picaresque that it simply will not do to speak of him here simply as a moose. He must be distinguished, as he has distinguished himself, from all others. call him the Missouri Kid.'

McKinney also quotes the end of an article Bil wrote on black-footed ferrets, a creature that may be extinct. Bil has looked for htem, and he knowsl people who have seen them, but the Fish and Wildlife service finally gave up the search. Bil's piece ends as follows:

"Perhaps we are now as a nation too poor to continue a public search-and-rescue operation for ferrets. If so, the general quality of life won't be endangered. In fact, if the last ferret should shuffle off this mortal coil (or already has), there will be no practical reverberations. Yet there are real limits as to how much of this sort of cost-accounting we can afford. Teh cost, as well as the considerable glory of being human, is that now and then we must go out into prairie-dog towns and look for ferrets. No ferret will ever come looking for us."

McKinney calls this "pure Gilbert." He says the interesting thing about Bil's writing is that he writes the way he talks; what he writes is who he is.

McKinney's advise: let your own voice come through, and the writing will take care of itself.

Learn to let the story tell itself. Be direct and clear. Don McKinney writes in (Writing Magazine Articles That Sell Writer's Digest Books, 1994) "The simple, uncomplicated approach to a dramatic situation will have more impact than the kind of souped-up prose that too many writers feel is necessary. Your best/first move might be to forget everything you ever learned about the "craft of writing" and get back to the basic approach, the direct, immediate, uncluttered way of telling a story you used when you were a child. To put it even more simply: Don't write like a writer--just write."

Exercise: Start reading with a view to understanding not only the subject matter, but something about the author as well. See if you can pinpoint evidence of the author's personality in the piece. Whenever you read an article that you find particularly satisfying, stop and study it long enough to determine what it is about the author's voice or style of writing that you find particularly interesting.